lack of courage to use one's reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another
Latin: argumentum ad verecundiam
- Meno:
- Is this true about yourself, Socrates, that you don’t even know what virtue is? Is this the report that we are to take home about you?
- Socrates:
- Not only that, you may also say that, to the best of my belief, I have never met anyone else who did know.
- Meno:
- What! Didn’t you meet Gorgias when he was here?
- Socrates:
- Yes.
- Meno:
- And you still didn’t think he knew?
- Socrates:
- I’m a forgetful sort of person, and I can’t say just now what I thought at the time. Probably he did know, and I expect you know what he used to say about it. So remind me what it was, or tell me yourself if you will. No doubt you agree with him.
- Meno:
- Yes, I do.
- Socrates:
- Then let’s leave him out of it, since after all he isn’t here. What do you yourself say virtue is?
-Plato, Meno, 71c, W. Guthrie, trans., Collected Dialogs (1961), p. 354
Comment: The recognition of Argument from Authority as fallacious thinking goes back a long way. At least to Socrates. Apart from pointing out the fallacy, Socrates also seems to imply that an appeal to authority is a way of avoiding a debate; most likely because the avoidee has no argument. When appealling to authority, we can cite a name, or author, of 'our argument' but we generally don't have a clue what that argument means. This is why Socrates by-passed Gorgias (the authority) to ask Meno, himself: "what do you yourself say?". This is how, I believe, one must deal with argument from authority, and idea laundering. Just as Socrates would've. Ask the person citing the authority or the argument to explain what that argument is. "It's good that you are convinced by this argument but do you really understand it, or are you just taking it on authority? If you really understood it, you should explain it to me, and back up your explanation with real data. Not necessarily here and now, but after you've prepared your argument in favour."
I shall always be grateful to one of my critics, who, in a book review, perplexed me by his remark that I was "anti-intellectual." I wrote him to find out what, precisely, made him level this charge. He replied by pointing out that I explicitly took issue with the governing ideas of today's intelligentsia, particularly its addiction to abstract theorizing. That much was true: I had held that the complexities of social, psychological, and moral life were ultimately unformalizable and I had urged a greater sensitivity to particulars. For my critic, the very fact that I had set myself against the intelligentsia made me anti-intellectual in "a straightforward sense." May I confess that this answer thrilled me? I knew that I had heard something important, something I would think about for a long time. I had always thought of an intellectual as someone who thinks for himself or herself, who explores ideas wherever they might lead, and who, above all, is animated by a spirit of nonconformism. He is suspicious of the argument from authority, especially group authority. Amicus Plato, sed magis arnica veritas. And here was a colleague with a very different idea of what it means to be an intellectual: someone who adheres to the governing ideas of the intelligentsia of his day. It struck me that one needs to draw a distinction between intellectualism and what might be called "intelligentsialism." It is important to distinguish an intellectual from someone who identifies as a member of the intelligentsia, although the lack of a separate English term for a member of the intelligentsia makes it easy to elide the difference. And of course, it is in the interest of the intelligentsia that the distinction should not be drawn. When I reflected that Russian has such a term-intelligent (plural intelligenty)--I began to draw a connection between the situation in American academia today and a topic on which I had long been working, the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and its opponents.
- Gary Saul Morson, 1993, What Is the Intelligentsia? Once More, an Old Russian Question
Comment:
Argument from Authority is a logical fallacy. Often called Appeal to Authority. Philosophy tells us: "You appeal to authority if you back up your reasoning by saying that it is supported by what some authority says on the subject." The appeal to authority[1] can be a fallacy when the authority is wrong. Often because we never hear what the authority says, we just take it on trust.
After that, conventional society (the establishment) then tell us that argument from authority is often actually a good thing because the 'authorities' are almost always right. Well I'm a skeptic, an empiricist, and a child of The European Enlightenment. I sometimes disagree with authorities. Authorities can often be authoritarian bullies, and use their power to railroad the populace into accepting whatever the authorities think is best for themselves.
Plus: Appeal to Authority is certainly the predominant intellectual fallacy of the day; of every day in the history of the world. Almost everyone is in thrall to it. This is why it is bad to cite an authority without understanding why or how the authority is right. See: How bad faith actors in Science and its identitarianism critics enable each other.
Gary Saul Morson remarked: "I explicitly took issue with the governing ideas of today's intelligentsia, particularly its addiction to abstract theorizing.". The prevalent groupthink fo the day is mainly a set of abstract ideas arrived at by God Knows How. This collective groupthink, our zeitgeist is never examined because everyone is bullied into taking it on trust. As common sense.
Current social battles over: "transwomen are women", BLM, CRT, anti-whiteness, equity, inclusion, diversity, net-zero, and climate change are a culture war over our zeitgeist. So the Left believe they are making a more just society. Their main argument in support is appeal to authority. Appeal to what all right-thinking, (or socially just thinking?) people believe.
Immanuel Kant eplained Enlightenment thinking as : "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity (Unmündigkeit)." He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one's reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another. So in a nutshell, Kant calls us all children because our minds are locked in with the prevalent groupthink of the establishment, who are, kind of, like our parents or guardians. We cannot think for ourselves; we are unenlightened because we defer to them. For Kant, Enlightenment does NOT mean we have something, be it: superior minds, all encompassing wisdom, the secrets of ancients, or the new High Priesthood (experts and scientists). For Kant, Enlightenment is more an absence of something. We don't put our faith in social groupthink, because we think for ourselves. Kant exclaims that the motto of the Enlightenment is "Sapere aude"! – Dare to be wise! Dare to criticse the established canon of laundered ideas.
Notes
Established canon : I don't so much mean the text of 'great thinkers' be they Plato, Kant, Augustine, Marx, Heidedder, or Foucault. I mean the recieved widom which codifies their laundered ideas; such as the text found in 'Marx 101', 'Plato for Idiots', or the 'Foucault cheat-sheet'.
